I was an atheist for the last 20 years and recently converted to Unitarian Universalist.

I would say that in the west, this characterization tends to be true. But I do think there are honest faith communities acting with good intent. Unfortunately, there are few.

Interesting that the beast is said to have seven heads in Revelation. There’s also 7 Trump Towers with his name on them:

• Trump Tower, NYC
• Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago
• Trump Towers, Istanbul
• Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto
• Trump World Tower, New York
• Trump Towers, Sunny Isles Beach
• Trump Tower, Manila

I’m a UU, so I don’t fully subscribe to the Bible as perfect and wholly divine or authoritative. But a bunch of people are wearing red colored Satan hats with a slogan on their forehead while voting for an adulterer, glutton, slothful, raging, envious, greedy, prideful “politician.” This man is so departed from Christ… I don’t get it, besides lies, propaganda, and accelerationism.

“Right people” might be how we got it. /rimshot

What is Mark has been a sentient AI for some time?

Sure, but the individual contribution vs. companies / state-owned organizations is like 70% come from 100 companies / orgs. So the individual percentage is still negligible.

I’m not disagreeing with the math. I’m saying when you want to make changes, you start with the most meaningful funnel. If you have 2 factors contributing to a problem, factor 1 contributes 70%, factor 2 contributes 30%, going after factor 2 seems like a waste of time. 1%s contribute 1000x the amount of the average. Who should be making lifestyle changes here?

#voidscreaming

The math here is the sort of thing that drives apathy for me to make small incremental changes. If the superrich can dump ~250 avg. emission years over the course of a year, why should I do anything besides lobby against this mode of transport or other large consumers? Maybe it’s a “spirit of the thing,” but changes in my life seem so negligible compared to how ruinous some individuals are acting.

updated

Does every single human need to be put into neat little categories without any grey room at all? It’s always good vs evil! Yeah! Exactly how life works! No complexity! 🙃

I’m a Bernie supporter. Pretty liberal. I wish no one died, the shooter included. I hate Trump, but stop cheering. Why are we celebrating the end of our species? We’re all human. It’s someone’s son, or brother, or family, or friend.

#ScreamingIntoTheVoid

Which came first? The AI image could be a bad render of the original picture with low quality.

There’s issues with models pushing back source material with minor modifications, which suggest they were trained on some copyrighted material. It seems like it could be the case here. Or, as you suggest, it’s a lowering of the AI quality to add a more realistic appearance.

12ft.io/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html

As far as I can tell, this product never panned out. It was backed by 132 people to cover 150k GBP in 2017. It was called the “Cyclotron Bike”.

There’s some diagnostic info when in game through the battery sidebar menu, I think. You can use that to see frame rate and other performance benchmarks.

I usually just google or YouTube some way to improve whatever game I’m playing on deck. Usually, someone has already done the leg work to figure it out.

Starting off with “we’ve heard your feedback” is something I’ve never heard from an abusive parent?

How many Farquaad quotes work for Trump with no edits?

David Bowie and Prince both bent and blurred gender lines while still being attractive, unique, and amazingly talented. Bowie died really close to his birthday, and both dates are close to my birthday.

When he died, I decided to check off some of my bucket list items, like performing in drag. Whenever I’ve felt self conscious, thinking about these icons really helped me be comfortable with myself and my journey.

I really miss both of them as a fan. :/ I wish I had seen them live.

Many things are designed for engagement, so what’s your point? Some people use Lemmy like Reddit and care about internet points that don’t matter. “The rising number is designed to exploit your behavioral patterns and enforce your engagement.” Instead of daily, it’s multiple times, but the point is you can paint many business models like this.

People download the app to get better at a skill. It’s designed to be effective at doing that. It’s a skill people want to learn. How is that exploitive or manipulative?

Full warning: I’ve worked in game design and F2P for like 10 years. I know there’s some personal bias, but there are much worse examples of this stuff than Duolingo or whatever. Painting good actors as bad actors is not correct.

The anecdote part at the end is irrelevant for both of us. I have the opposite experience and don’t even use this app: a bunch of my friends seem to all use it for learning languages. /shrug

Why evil? I’m not a capitalist, but it’s a language learning company being silly; they aren’t causing massive injustice.

It’s run well for me. A little hiccup with text entering, but that’s standard.

About to be a lot of “accidental” falls out of windows.

I believe in UBI, but the Captain Laserhawk show made me aware of how much it could get twisted in fucked up ways. “Don’t watch this show? -$100 from your stipend this month.” I used to think things like that were fear mongering, but the world is all kinds of weird today.

More AI:

Do you hear the denim sing? Singing a song of jean-clad men? It is the fabric of the people Who won’t wear slacks again!

When the stitching in your seams Echoes the rhythm of the looms There is a style about to gleam When tomorrow’s hemline blooms!